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Control Technology: The Future Of Technology And Its Impact On Our Lives

Posted January 2019 Author William

Are your opinions really your own—or how much have they been carefully shaped until you think they are? Today’s digital connectivity makes it possible to share information like never before—traditional borders and constraints of distance simply do not exist anymore. But this same connectivity also makes it easier to manipulate the public’s perception of reality. The term “fake news” has become increasingly common in the past year—but it is only one facet of a much larger problem: the use of technology to alter public opinion, and ultimately affect the real world.

This is not a new phenomenon. At every point in human history where a new disruptive communications technology has replaced another, propaganda and manipulation flourish. Each communication method has its associated societal norms and customs, but these take time to form. What is allowed on television, radio, and print is well established—but the Internet has not reached that level of maturity yet.

“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.

“The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.” ~ Dr. José Delgado. Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.

Carolanne Wright – Psychotronics is the intersection between consciousness, energy fields and matter. In a bill introduced to the U.S. House of Representative in 2001, Dennis J. Kucinich describes psychotronic devices as “weapons” that can be used against individuals or specific populations to exert power over behavior and mood — essentially a form of mind control.

Russia has a long history of developing this class of technology, the most famous being the “Woodpecker” — a “Tesla-type transmitter” that emitted psychoactive signals in the 1970’s through the late eighties.

But Russia isn’t the only player in this dangerous game. GlobalResearch reports:

“Harnessing neuroscience to military capability, this technology is the result of decades of research and experimentation, most particularly in the Soviet Union and the United States. (Welsh, 1997, 2000) We have failed to comprehend that the result of the technology that originated in the years of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the West, has resulted in using satellite technology not only for surveillance and communication systems but also to lock on to human beings, manipulating brain frequencies by directing laser beams, neural-particle beams, electro-magnetic radiation, sonar waves, radio frequency radiation (RFR), soliton waves, torsion fields and by use of these or other energy fields which form the areas of study for astro-physics. Since the operations are characterized by secrecy, it seems inevitable that the methods that we do know about, that is, the exploitation of the ionosphere, our natural shield, are already outdated as we begin to grasp the implications of their use.”

In a 1998 German television documentary, Dr. Igor Smirnov, of the Institute of Psycho-Correction in Moscow, said that it’s easily conceivable that anyone who has the appropriate means and finances could inject himself into every computer network, radio or television broadcast with relative technological ease. “This is why such technology is rightfully feared.”

By now, a good number of people are familiar with the effects of electromagnetic pollution from cell phones, televisions, appliances, smart meters, computers and wi-fi. But could there be another more sinister reason why our health suffers when we’re exposed to these modern devices? Several U.S. patents suggest a disquieting answer.

Hidden mind control technology

“It is therefore possible to manipulate the nervous system of a subject by pulsing images displayed on a nearby computer monitor or TV set. For the latter, the image pulsing may be imbedded in the program material, or it may be overlaid by modulating a video stream, either as an RF signal or as a video signal.”

The invention can also be adapted to the source of video stream, whether a computer program, a television broadcast, video tape or DVD. Pulse variability can be influenced through the use of software in order to avoid habituation of the nervous system.

“Certain monitors can emit electromagnetic field pulses that excite a sensory resonance in a nearby subject, through image pulses that are so weak as to be subliminal. This is unfortunate since it opens a way for mischievous application of the invention, whereby people are exposed unknowingly to manipulation of their nervous systems for someone else’s purposes. Such application would be unethical and is of course not advocated. It is mentioned here in order to alert the public to the possibility of covert abuse that may occur while being online, or while watching TV, a video, or a DVD,” conclude the inventors.

Moreover, patents owned by Raytheon detail how to create “nuclear sized explosions without radiation” and describe electromagnetic pulse, power beam technology and over-the-horizon detection systems. One such patent (US 7629918 B2) describes the Multifunctional Radio Frequency Directed Energy System (RFDE):

“Radio frequency directed energy (RFDE) systems are known in the art for directing high power RF, microwave and/or millimeter wave electromagnetic energy to destroy or disrupt a target. Although RFDE systems typically serve as military weapons, RFDE systems need not be limited to weapon systems.

“An RFDE weapon system can go after a broad range of targets (electronics, biological, ordinance, structures, etc.) due to its relatively large radiated power. A priori knowledge of the intended target characteristics is typically not required because the RFDE weapon either burns-out or overwhelms its target by the shear amount of power it radiates.”

A disturbing possibility (among many) concerning this type of weaponry is the capability of using it to cause negative effects on human health and mental processes. And there is no escape or protection. Once a target is locked onto, it’s impossible to evade the electromagnetic energy by moving around.

Summaries of 85 additional patents relating to mental and emotional manipulation technologies can be found here.

As we contemplate the technological advancements — and ethical implications — relating to mind control, remember President John F. Kennedy’s warning in 1961:

“Today no war has been declared — and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack… we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means. … Whatever our hopes may be for the future — for reducing this threat or living with it — there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security — a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity. … This is a time of peace and peril, which knows no precedent in history. It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to… our obligation to inform and alert the American people — to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well. … I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens, whenever they are fully informed.”

Assassination is the murder of a person, often (but not always) or ruler, usually for political reasons or paymen. Or the common man.

An assassination may be prompted by, political, or military motives; it is an act that may be done for financial gain, to avenge a grievance, from a desire to acquire fame or notoriety, or because of a military, security or insurgent group’s command to carry out the homicide.

The World Coalition against Covert Harassment is committed to raising awareness to the legal systems as well as to the medical and scientific community to the crime of illegal biomedical and weaponry research committed on citizens in the European Union and beyond. As a European network, EUCACH acts as a lobbying and advocacy platform towards the EU. Using our international network of scientific and technology experts, partner civil and human rights organisations as well as important stakeholders in civil society, we provide consultancy services to the EU Institutions based on our expertise. EUCACH’s organisational goal is to influence EU legislation and the decision-making process in calling for a worldwide ban on weapons that might enable any form of manipulation of human beings.

Online-connected brains and neural networks.

“ICT” = Information and Communication Technologies

“BMI” = Brain Machine Interface, brain-computer interconnection

“FET” = Future and Emerging Technologies

“S.T.” = Synthetic Telepathy

“A.I.” = Artificial Intelligence.

On the road to mind control: DARPA’s new program will use a chip to connect brains.For additional background to the latest press release from DARPA posted in full below, I encourage you to read the following selection of linked articles
where I discuss the scope and chronology of what is being studied. Therein, you will find that the U.S. BRAIN Initiative and its European counterpart, the Human Brain Project, are not spending multi-billions of dollars on neuroscience research
simply to help people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and organic brain dysfunction. It is, perhaps first and foremost, a military endeavor that has wide ramifications if even 1/10th of what is being studied comes to fruition. In short, it’s more about mind control than it is about brain restoration and improvement. Please keep this in mind when you read DARPA’s emphasis on “new therapies.” •Obama Doubles Down on BRAIN Project and Military Mind Control

DARPA Press Release:

A new DARPA program aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world. The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology. The goal is to achieve this communications link in a biocompatible device no larger than one cubic centimeter in size, roughly the volume of two nickels stacked back to back.

The program, Neural Engineering System Design (NESD), stands to dramatically enhance research capabilities in neurotechnology and provide a foundation for new therapies.

“Today’s best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem,” said Phillip Alvelda, the NESD program manager. “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics.”

Among the program’s potential applications are devices that could compensate for deficits in sight or hearing by feeding digital auditory or visual information into the brain at a resolution and experiential quality far higher than is possible with current technology.

Neural interfaces currently approved for human use squeeze a tremendous amount of information through just 100 channels, with each channel aggregating signals from tens of thousands of neurons at a time. The result is noisy and imprecise. In contrast, the NESD program aims to develop systems that can communicate clearly and individually with any of up to one million neurons in a given region of the brain.

Achieving the program’s ambitious goals and ensuring that the envisioned devices will have the potential to be practical outside of a research setting will require integrated breakthroughs across numerous disciplines including neuroscience, synthetic biology, low-power electronics, photonics, medical device packaging and manufacturing, systems engineering, and clinical testing. In addition to the program’s hardware challenges, NESD researchers will be required to develop advanced mathematical and neuro-computation techniques to first transcode high-definition sensory information between electronic and cortical neuron representations and then compress and represent those data with minimal loss of fidelity and functionality.

To accelerate that integrative process, the NESD program aims to recruit a diverse roster of leading industry stakeholders willing to offer state-of-the-art prototyping and manufacturing services and intellectual property to NESD researchers on a pre-competitive basis. In later phases of the program, these partners could help transition the resulting technologies into research and commercial application spaces.

To familiarize potential participants with the technical objectives of NESD, DARPA will host a Proposers Day meeting that runs Tuesday and Wednesday, February 2-3, 2016, in Arlington, Va. The Special Notice announcing the Proposers Day meeting is available athttps://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-SN-16-16/listing.html. More details about the Industry Group that will support NESD is available athttps://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-SN-16-17/listing.html. A Broad Agency Announcement describing the specific capabilities sought is available at: http://go.usa.gov/cP474.

DARPA anticipates investing up to $60 million in the NESD program over four years.

FET and ICT research and development (of the new “computer – brain language”) allows computers to read and learn human thought patterns by using injectable brain – machine – interface.

About the same brain-machine interface has has been used to cure Parkinson’s disease , Alzheimer’s and depression can also be used for accessing the brain’s memory.

Digital Mind

Professor Goran Hermerén OPINION OF THE EUROPEAN GROUP ON ETHICS IN SCIENCE AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES TO THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION (ETHICAL ASPECTS OF ICT IMPLANTS IN THE HUMAN BODY) March 2005

Link to document

The new software for the brain-machine interface in nano electronics combined with “Europe’s new information technology” provides the researchers with the possibillities for reading and taking “software images” of the brain’s neuron network.

A method that provides high-resolution copies of the brains cognitive behavior and human perception.

Tomorrow’s high-speed computers and related research has evolved into a sophisticated “computer game” with “mind reading” on real people….

These research methods are unknown to our society’s legal system!

So how can research on the brain by “serious” (criminal) organizations in ICT-FET be stopped?

SYNTHETIC TELEPATHY for medicine or mind reading is a direct communication with nanoelectronics between computer and human brain.

Synthetic telepathy is a communication system based on thought, not speech.

It can be used to control for example a prosthesis and cure diseases such as Parkinson’s disease but can also decode the patterns used to study cognitive behavior such as memory, learning and emotion. With nano technology, the digital information can be recorded using the new quantum-inspired computers.

Simulation of behavior can be identified and provide diagnostic data for identifying the precursors to diseases such as dementia, stroke and myocardial infarction

This letter is intended to demonstrate a paradox in the Swedish so-called “protection of human rights” and thus the entire Swedish justice system. Synthetic telepathy could, as practiced in Sweden, lie behind an unknown number of violent crimes and suicides due to research deliberately kept hidden from regulators.

Doctors and psychiatrics diagnose people with “voices in his head” following their “manuals”. DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) published by the American Psychiatric Association and the ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Disorders and Related Health Problems).

This is an old-fashioned black and white and diagnose when the EU priority FET ICT research and develop new information technologies adapted to nano-electronics.

mind-control-weapons

Ulf Gorman writes in the book that with nano technology, we open the doors to an unknown area where we do not know how to apply ethics. What should be and what should not be allowed when you implant a chip that can both read and influence the brain? He takes the example of studying learning and memory.

Micro Implants can provide unprecedented opportunities to understand how we learn and remember things, and hence why we forget and find it difficult to learn. And it can be understood as a form of abuse to look like that into our most private mental world.

Lund University writes about the development of nano-electrodes that can both listen and communicate with neuronal synapses and their cell membranes.

EU priority ICT and FET research are talking about a “A whole new communication technology in Europe” “It will help us understand and exploit the ways in which social and biological systems, organization and evolution, will pave the way for the development of new opportunities for next-generation software and network technologies “.
To understand how the human brain works not only leads to innovations in medicine but also provides new models for energy, fault-tolerant and adaptive computing technologies “.
An initiative of the Virtual Human Physiology that are individually tailored and virtual simulations of the human body where you would expect enormous progress in disease prevention and health care.
The pioneering work carried out also on new ideas such as artificial living cells, synthetic biology, chemical communication, collective intelligence and two-way interface between brain and machine.

Brain reading

Other sources, e.g The UCI (University of California Irvin. Department of Cognitive Science) describes the development of Synthetic Telepathy:

Collaboration between cognitive science, neuro-science, specialists in speech recognition and brain imaging will develop a brain-machine interface. This device could help paralyzed and soldiers would be able to send messages directly from the brain to a computer.

Researcher Michael D’Zmura, President of the UCI describes that the system begins with “the little voice in your head“.

How can a medical diagnosis unequivocally describe people’s perception of voices in their head and that no alternative can exist except mental disease.

Why? -because it is a prerequisite to be able to “hear” voices for the use of new information technology?

This is why these researchers must be forced to go public and announce this new scientific communication technology.

This paradox must be investigated immediately.With the exclusion of the development of a Swedish and European military force with superior two-way “radio” communication with the brain.

A number of past court cases are more or less directly caused by S.T. This “voice to skull” technology must immediately be taken into consideration as an alternative for triggering a number of previously committed violent crimes and suicides.

During the development of BMI, software and network technologies are also computerized and long distance imaging of peoples cognitive behavior and perception. Material that is recorded in the computer that runs the real time simulation and creation of artificial intelligence (for initializing A.I. and computerized decision making.)

The image of the brain’s “machine-code” is probably the most comprehensive and advanced ever made. Cognitive behavior depicted and simulated, language and meaning of the words for the subjects are identified. Human perception and mapping how the brain handles information, the image of mathematics reached its perfection.

neuron wave A new research scandal and the fatal consequences for the wider community.

Around the clock the computerized study goes on using collective, artificial intelligence and self-learning systems. The victims testimonies tells us that you can sadly conclude unequivocally that the studies will not be completed until the victim in one way or another has been broken down and / or otherwise inactivated.

This provides power to simulate decomposition for the digital copy thus the fact that the criminal research will not end and is never disclosed.

Descriptions to the vulnerable people who eat psychotropic drugs due to their experiences the experiments and testing goes on, various medicines can affect the “test objects” (or guinea pigs) everything is recorded and compared with previous values (from the multi-annual copy of their real-time neural network and thus the registration of their behavior.)

Obviously this is a disgusting and illegal way to meet the advanced development of tomorrow’s medicine.

The “studies” have resulted in enormous damage to many subjects.The number of unrecorded victims/subjects is probably very high.Families are fragmented, the children of these families are suffering tremendously. One of the subjects have recently been hospitalized with a cracked skull, caused by disconnecting the balance system remotely. The accident occurred in public settings.

A new research scandal and the fatal consequences for the wider community.

To influence the balance system is another typical example of how technology is used against the victim to incapacitate them for society. Direct assassination attempts on several previous occasions orchestrated by the brain control deliberately strikes out the human balance system, Why this happens is likely as an alternative to the mentally ill to be treated (as “possessed”) or having a neurological disease.

Brain – copying with BMI and broadband access is definitely no longer a marginal research.Employers have over the years lost millions of dollars and cut-downs is to be expected due to excluded employees. Broken families, children who, years later can not study or work is now forced to seek psychiatric care.

Siblings, grandparents and their closest friends are suffering tremendously. Advanced Medical and hospital care due to study design is a mockery of health-care and doctors who are not familiar with this research. Insurance in the multi-million figures was raised through direct damage caused by brain control. Property for millions of dollars are lost.

Injuries and privacy intrusion of thousands of people is done through “volunteers” that serve as multimedia machines i.e node for the recording of all contacts they have, such as politicians, scientists, lawyers, friends, acquaintances, relatives, international business relations, etc..

Security codes, access codes, etc. is with the new technology no longer private.How can we know that people are not equipped with the new brain-machine interface which makes the person a multimedia application with a function as a live missile is already deployed as nodes in the political and financial world of illegal recording of their conversations with the world?

A sinister JOY seems to embrace the researchers and perpetrators over this superior and powerful tool for mind control and copying brainwave patterns. The tool is, without a doubt, a weapon of offense and stealth.

Implant technology in these forms should immediately be classified as a lethal weapon! It communicates directly with the brain’s neurons and can bring the entire neural nervous system to a halt.(Exclusion of balance can be immediately implied on a victim.)

The technology is now used for purposes of breaking down the persons psyche, with serious accusations, threats, mock execution, incitement to suicide, physical violence, e.g, decrease and increase heart rate, pain in and around the heart, severe chest pains, sudden and painful headaches, difficulty to breathe, tampering with rectum, prostate and muscles to name a few.

The macabre in the use of this technology is that subjects are exposed to these atrocities while the society is not legally able to influence the situation. Sweden is in this matter a lawless country where the researchers grossly exploit the situation.

Face mind

This ultimate humiliation has reached a whole new level. The researchers tries with the enforced communication and slow decomposition enslave people with exhortations to try to see the individual results of the brain control. One can calculate due to the nature and perennial perspective that there are naturally a unrecorded number of people who have been driven to madness and death with this technology.

There is nowhere the victims can hide or escape the access signals to their thoughts. Scientists simulate with computers, 24/7 365 days a year to break down the subjects and stop them from trying to understand what’s happening to them…

A series of grotesque roles played in order to manipulate the brain, threats and statements that are mixed with modern technology. It is also in the researchers’ strategy to make the picture unclear for the subjects if they attempt to get an overall picture of who the perpetrator is and the real goals of the research, a military strategy conducted by veterans and experts in the matters.

The disrespectful research performed and visualized in a 3D virtual game world in the researchers’ computers, with no ethical boundaries and human rights but with real living human beings as “avatars”. It is quite similar to the popular interactive game “The Sims‘, But this game delivers human reality-based measurement data for research.

Cover-up of brain monitoring technologies means that the crime is waterproof, human rights laws and manipulated by a hidden militant regime researcher with expertise in information technology. In addition, the researchers say they in the dialogue to be the police power which in itself is an extremely serious offense.

For the victims– former high-performance hard-working people with families, children, an orderly life and social contacts. People who all his life been performing taxpayers. Because of a work-related mental fatigue and time on medical therapy sessions with the scientists the opportunity to take advantage of the situation of persons for investigation and contemporary development of the new BMI and brain monitoring technologies.

As these technologies and opportunities are not announced, but several instances re-written, must be able to use knowledge and skills which are available. Sweden is a small country and the people engaged in this activity may not be so difficult to identify and stop.

The researchers in these studies have assumed the right that during the permanent reproduction of human neurotransmitters in the long term also destroy them and their life’s work. The issue is called for; How affected society to know that the violent crime and suicide has been performed in the Stockholm area and Europe in recent years and clearly diagnosed as being caused by mental illness with the voices in heads is an expression of pure brain research!

By: Magnus Olsson

HOW WE DO IT…

◾Awareness-raising campaigns to disseminate information and mobilise public opinion on the issue of covert technologies and techniques that enable the manipulation of human beings

◾Providing expert consultancy to key decision-makers on the creation of appropriate EU legislation to protect citizens from this kind of covert crimes.

◾Organising networking events (workshops, seminars, conferences) involving all actors concerned to exchange experiences and best practices for the establishment of clear ethical boundaries to strictly regulate the use of systems enabling the manipulation and control of human beings.

It is our philosophy that all men are equal before the law. Everybody’s right to life shall be protected. Nobody shall be subjected to torture or held in slavery. Any technologies and techniques capable of endangering the human physical and/or psychological health, to modify the individuals’ autonomy and affect their dignity should be strictly prohibited.

Read more about ICT – implants at the European Group on Ethics and New Technologies:

‘Major’ IBM breakthrough breathes new life into Moore’s Law…

What’s This?

Close-up view of the structure of a carbon nanotube.

Image: Science Picture Co., Corbis

By Lance Ulanoff1 day ago

Silicon is dead. Long live, carbon nanotubes.

In transistors, size matters — a lot. You can’t squeeze more silicon transistors (think billions of them) into a processor unless you can make them smaller, but the smaller these transistors get, the higher the resistance between contacts, which means the current can’t flow freely through them and, in essence, the transistors and chips built based on them, can no longer do their jobs. Ultra-tiny carbon nanotube transistors, though are poised to solve the size issue.

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, IBM scientists announced they had found a way to reduce the contact length of carbon nanotube transistors — a key component of the tech and the one that most impacts resistance — down to 9 nanometers without increasing resistance at all. To put this in perspective, contact length on traditional, silicon-based 14nm node technology (something akin to Intel’s 14nm technology) currently sits at about 25 nanometers.

“In the silicon space, the contact resistance is very low if the contact is very long. If contact is very short, the resistance shoots up very quickly and gets large. So you have trouble getting current through the device,” Wilfried Haensch, IBM Senior Manager, Physics & Materials for Logic and Communications, told me.

Because of their unique properties,

carbon nanotubes, which happen to be 10,000 times thinner than a single strand of human hair, have been a promising tech for continuing Moore’s Law

carbon nanotubes, which happen to be 10,000 times thinner than a single strand of human hair, have been a promising tech for continuing Moore’s Law, which roughly states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years. However, according to Haensch, the technology faces considerable hurdles before it can be considered appropriate for commercial integrated circuit development.

First of all, the creation of tubes you can use in semiconductors isn’t easy. Haensch told me the current yields for useful material are still well below what they need. They also have to work out how to place the nanotubes 10nm apart or less on a wafer. Thirdly, they have to be able to scale devices based on carbon nanotubes to competitive dimensions.

There are actually two size issues to manage in chip scalability: Transistor gate and contact length. IBM solved the gate issue two years ago. “Scalability of contact was the last challenge on scalability,” said Haensch, and now IBM scientists report they’ve solved that, too. In their experiments, IBM scientists shrunk the contact length down to 9nm without any increase in resistance.

These results put the world one step closer to carbon nanotube-based integrated circuits. Such chips could conceivably run at the same speed as current transistors, but use significantly less power.

At maximum power, though, Haensch told me, these carbon nanotube chips could run at significantly faster speeds. Not only does this promise a future of ever faster computers, but it could lead to considerably better battery life for your most trusted companion — the smartphone.

This was an engineering breakthrough, though, that almost wasn’t. After working on the scalability problem for years, Haensch’s team came to him last year with results that shortened the contact length to 20nm.

They said, “Oh, we have something here. We need to publish,” Haensch recalled, who deflated the team’s excitement, telling them, “No, you don’t really have anything.”

Haensch sent them back to the lab telling them not to come back until they could produce something smaller than 10nm. “They were very disappointed they couldn’t write the paper,” said Haensch.

Then, a few months ago, the team returned with new results. “‘We got down to 9nm, and, by the way, we can reproduce the results.”

Haensch was thrilled. “Taking away the early gratification really gave us good results,” he said. It may also have given Moore’s Law a new lease on life and the world an exciting new future of electronics.

In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal – an event called singularity – according to a futurist from Google.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100.

Kurweil made the claims during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York at the weekend.

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Ray Kurzweil – director of engineering at Google – claims that by 2045 humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal – an event called singularity. He made the statement at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York

WHAT IS SINGULARITY?

Technological singularity is the development of ‘superintelligence’ brought about through the use of technology.

The first use of the term ‘singularity’ refer to technological minds was by mathematician John von Neumann. Neumann in the mid-1950s.

He said: ‘ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.’

The term was then used by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge who believesbrain-computer interfaces are causes of the singularity.

Ray Kurzweil cited von Neumann’s use of the term in a foreword to von Neumann’s classic The Computer and the Brain.

Kurzweil predicts the singularity to occur around 2045 while Vinge predicts it will happen before 2030.

The conference was created by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov and featured visonary talks about how the world will look by 2045.

Kurzweil said: ‘Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we’ll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold.’

He referred to Moore’s Law that states the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing.

In Kurweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near, he plots this development and journey towards singularity in a graph.

This singularity is also referred to as digital immortality because brains and a person’s intelligence will be digitally stored forever, even after they die.

He also added that this will be possible through neural engineering and referenced the recent strides made towards modeling the brain and technologies which can replace biological functions.

Examples of such technology given by LiveScience include the cochlear implant – an implant that is attached to the brain’s cochlear nerve and electronically stimulates it to restore hearing to someone who is deaf.

Other examples include technology that can restore motor skills after the nervous system is damaged.

Ray Kurzweil, pictured, said that ‘frail, biological parts’ of human bodies will be replaced with ‘non-biological’ parts in the future. He added that the non-biological part will become so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part and make it redundant

Earlier this year, doctors from Cornell University used 3D printing to create a prosthetic ear using cells of cartilage.

A solid plastic mould was printed and then filled with high-density collagen gel.The researchers then added cartilage cells into the collagen matrix.

Kurweil was invited to the conference because he has previously written books around the idea of singularity.

Expanding on this idea Martine Rothblatt, CEO of biotech company United Therapeutics introduced the idea of ‘mindclones’.

These are digital versions of humans that can live forever and can create ‘mindfiles’ that are a place to store aspects of our personalities.

She said it would run on a kind of software for consciousness and told The Huffington Post: ‘The first company that develops mindware will have [as much success as] a thousand Googles.’

Rothblatt added that the presence of mindware could lead to replacing other parts of the body with ‘non-biological’ parts.

During Kurzweil’s conference talk, and in his book The Singularity Is Near, he refers to Moore’s Law of Computing, pictured. The law claims that the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years which puts us on course for singularity by 2045

This is a concept that Kurweil also discussed and was the basis of his book Fantastic Voyage.

In this book he discusses immortality and how he believes the human body will develop.

He said: ‘We’re going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more.

‘In fact the non-biological part – the machine part – will be so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part. So even if that biological part went away it wouldn’t make any difference.

DIGITAL AVATARS USED TO CURE SCHIZOPHRENIA

An avatar system that can help schizophrenics control the voices in their heads is being developed by British researchers.

As part of the therapy, patients create an avatar by choosing a face and a voice for the person, or persons, they believe are inside their head.

Therapists can then encourage the patients to oppose the avatar and force it away, which boosts their confidence in dealing with their hallucinations.

The first stage in the therapy is for the patient to create a computer-based avatar, by choosing the face and voice of the entity they believe is talking to them.

The system then synchronises the avatar’s lips with its speech, enabling a therapist to speak to the patient through the avatar in real-time.

The therapist encourages the patient to oppose the voice and gradually teaches them to take control of their hallucinations.

The avatar doesn’t address the patients’ delusions directly but the study found the hallucinations improve as an overall effect of the therapy.

This is because patients can interact with the avatar as though it was a real person, because they have created it, but they know it cannot harm them.

Many of the voices heard by schizophrenics threaten to kill or harm them and their family.

‘We’ll also have non-biological bodies – we can create bodies with nano technology, we can create virtual bodies and virtual reality in which the virtual reality will be as realistic as the actual reality.

‘The virtual bodies will be as detailed and convincing as real bodies.

‘We do need a body, our intelligence is directed towards a body but it doesn’t have to be this frail, biological body that is subject to all kinds of failure modes.

‘But I think we’ll have a choice of bodies, we’ll certainly be routinely changing our parent body through virtual reality and today you can have a different body in something like Second Life, but it’s just a picture on the screen.

‘Research has shown that people actually begin to subjectively identify with their avatar.

‘But in the future it’s not going to be a little picture in a virtual environment you’re looking at. It will feel like this is your body and you’re in that environment and your body is the virtual body and it can be as realistic as real reality.

‘So we’ll be routinely able to change our bodies very quickly as well as our environments. If we had radical life extension only we would get profoundly bored and we would run out of thing to do and new ideas.

‘In additional to radical life extension we’re going to have radical life expansion.

‘We’re going to have million of virtual environments to explore that we’re going to literally expand our brains – right now we only have 300 million patterns organised in a grand hierarchy that we create ourselves.

‘But we could make that 300 billion or 300 trillion. The last time we expanded it with the frontal cortex we created language and art and science. Just think of the qualitative leaps we can’t even imagine today when we expand our near cortex again.’

The $1.3B Quest to Build a Supercomputer Replica of a Human Brain

Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram’s 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that—if it panned out—would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. And the South African–born neuroscientist pronounced that he would accomplish all this through an insanely ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain—from synapses to hemispheres—and simulate it on a supercomputer. Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted to build a working mind from the ground up.

In the four years since Markram’s speech, he hasn’t backed off a nanometer. The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety—from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness—is a lack of ambition. If only neuroscience would follow his lead, he insists, his Human Brain Project could simulate the functions of all 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and the 100 trillion connections that link them. And once that’s done, once you’ve built a plug-and-play brain, anything is possible. You could take it apart to figure out the causes of brain diseases. You could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new range of intelligent technologies. You could strap on a pair of virtual reality glasses and experience a brain other than your own.

The way Markram sees it, technology has finally caught up with the dream of AI: Computers are finally growing sophisticated enough to tackle the massive data problem that is the human brain. But not everyone is so optimistic. “There are too many things we don’t yet know,” says Caltech professor Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at one of neuroscience’s biggest data producers, the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. “The roundworm has exactly 302 neurons, and we still have no frigging idea how this animal works.” Yet over the past couple of decades, Markram’s sheer persistence has garnered the respect of people like Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel and Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim. He has impressed leading figures in biology, neuroscience, and computing, who believe his initiative is important even if they consider some of his ultimate goals unrealistic.

Markram has earned that support on the strength of his work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where he and a group of 15 postdocs have been taking a first stab at realizing his grand vision—simulating the behavior of a million-neuron portion of the rat neocortex. They’ve broken new ground on everything from the expression of individual rat genes to the organizing principles of the animal’s brain. And the team has not only published some of that data in peer-reviewed journals but also integrated it into a cohesive model so it can be simulated on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer.

The big question is whether these methods can scale. There’s no guarantee that Markram will be able to build out the rest of the rat brain, let alone the vastly more complex human brain. And if he can, nobody knows whether even the most faithful model will behave like a real brain—that if you build it, it will think. For all his bravado, Markram can’t answer that question. “But the only way you can find out is by building it,” he says, “and just building a brain is an incredible biological discovery process.” This is too big a job for just one lab, so Markram envisions an estimated 6,000 researchers around the world funneling data into his model. His role will be that of prophet, the sort of futurist who presents worthy goals too speculative for most scientists to countenance and then backs them up with a master plan that makes the nearly impossible appear perfectly plausible. Neuroscientists can spend a whole career on a single cell or molecule. Markram will grant them the opportunity and encouragement to band together and pursue the big questions.

And now Markram has funding almost as outsized as his ideas. On January 28, 2013, the European Commission—the governing body of the European Union—awarded him 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion). For decades, neuroscientists and computer scientists have debated whether a computer brain could ever be endowed with the intelligence of a human. It’s not a hypothetical debate anymore. Markram is building it. Will he replicate consciousness? The EU has bet $1.3 billion on it.

Ancient Egyptian surgeons believed that the brain was the “marrow of the skull” (in the graphic wording of a 3,500-year-old papyrus). About 1,500 years later, Aristotle decreed that the brain was a radiator to cool the heart’s “heat and seething.” While neuroscience has come a long way since then, the amount that we know about the brain is still minuscule compared to what we don’t know.

Over the past century, brain research has made tremendous strides, but it’s all atomized and highly specific—there’s still no unified theory that explains the whole. We know that the brain is electric, an intricately connected network, and that electrical signals are modulated by chemicals. In sufficient quantity, certain combinations of chemicals (called neurotransmitters) cause a neuron to fire an electrical signal down a long pathway called an axon. At the end of the axon is a synapse, a meeting point with another neuron. The electrical spike causes neurotransmitters to be released at the synapse, where they attach to receptors in the neighboring neuron, altering its voltage by opening or closing ion channels. At the simplest level, comparisons to a computer are helpful. The synapses are roughly equivalent to the logic gates in a circuit, and axons are the wires. The combination of inputs determines an output. Memories are stored by altering the wiring. Behavior is correlated with the pattern of firing.

Yet when scientists study these systems more closely, such reductionism looks nearly as rudimentary as the Egyptian notions about skull marrow. There are dozens of different neurotransmitters (dopamine and serotonin, to name two) plus as many neuroreceptors to receive them. There are more than 350 types of ion channel, the synaptic plumbing that determines whether a neuron will fire. At its most fine-grained, at the level of molecular biology, neuroscience attempts to describe and predict the effect of neurotransmitters one ion channel at a time. At the opposite end of the scale is functional magnetic resonance imaging, the favorite tool of behavioral neuroscience. Scans can roughly track which parts of the brain are active while watching a ball game or having an orgasm, albeit only by monitoring blood flow through the gray matter: the brain again viewed as a radiator.

Two large efforts—the Allen Brain Atlas and the National Institutes of Health-funded Human Connectome Project—are working at levels in between these two extremes, attempting to get closer to that unified theory that explains the whole. The Allen Brain Atlas is mapping the correlation between specific genes and specific structures and regions in both human and mouse brains. The Human Connectome Project is using noninvasive imaging techniques that show where wires are bundled and how those bundles are connected in human brains.

To add to the brain-mapping mix, President Obama in April announced the launch of an initiative called Brain (commonly referred to as the Brain Activity Map), which he hopes Congress will make possible with a $3 billion NIH budget. (To start, Obama is pledging $100 million of his 2014 budget.) Unlike the static Human Connectome Project, the proposed Brain Activity Map would show circuits firing in real time. At present this is feasible, writes Brain Activity Map participant Ralph Greenspan, “in the little fruit fly Drosophila.”

Even scaled up to human dimensions, such a map would chart only a web of activity, leaving out much of what is known of brain function at a molecular and functional level. For Markram, the American plan is just grist for his billion-euro mill. “The Brain Activity Map and other projects are focused on generating more data,” he writes. “The Human Brain Project is about data integration.” In other words, from his exalted perspective, the NIH and President Obama are just a bunch of postdocs ready to work for him.